MEAWW.COM / NEWS / HUMAN INTEREST

Man nearly dies after he shoves 20-inch eel up his anus believing it would cure constipation

The 49-year-old went to his friends for medical advice and they told him about the unproven folklore method of curing constipation which involved a live eel.

Nearly 12 percent of the world's population suffers from constipation. And people in the Americas and the Asian Pacific suffer twice as much as their European counterparts, according to Medscape. No matter how painful the problem is, there are usually tons of home remedies that can be if one does not want to go to the doctor. But one man decided to take matters into his own hands and make it worse for himself. The 49-year-old from Baiyun District in Guangzhou, capital of south China’s Guangdong Province decided to try a remedy suggested by his friends and it almost proved fatal. 

Proving once again that giving in to peer pressure is never a good thing irrespective of age, the man, only identified as Liu, was told to stick a live eel up his backside to cure his constipation. He went to his friends for medical advice and they told him about the folklore method of curing constipation which involved a live eel to help with smoother bowel movement. So Liu got a 20-inch Asian swamp eel to try the remedy without even seeking a second opinion. After the deed had been done, Liu had to get himself admitted to the hospital after he started experiencing unbearable stomachache.

Doctors said the man arrived at Guangzhou Dongren Hospital complaining about abdominal pain, according to The Sun. But he did not reveal the bizarre stunt that had landed him there. He appeared to be inebriated when he arrived at the hospital and was immediately rushed into surgery. Much to the shock of the doctors, they found a live eel in the man's stomach. Dr. Zhao Zhirong said: "We opened up his stomach and saw the eel amongst his feces and food debris. He also suffered a punctured pancreas." The eel had managed to break through Liu's intestines and generated “a mess” in the man’s stomach “almost killing him."

Liu was lucky to be alive and if he had not been operated on time, he may have died due to blockage in his systems. "When we asked the patient after surgery, he said the eel swam up by itself," Zhirong said. "But he later admitted that he put it there himself while following a folk remedy for bowel obstruction." As a medical expert, he noted that there was "no scientific base" for such a treatment involving live eels. Liu is recovering after this unfortunate incident. It was unclear what happened to the eel.

Asian swamp eels are considered a delicacy in coastal China. They have a scaleless and slender body allowing them to move in waves and burrow efficiently. But what is shocking is that Liu's is not an isolated incident and doctors in China have removed eels from stomachs before. In another similar incident, a 51-year-old construction worker in China swallowed two live eels to try and treat his constipation. He nearly died and was left in a critical state after the eels tore through his intestines, reported the Daily Mail. He was rushed to the hospital by his colleagues where he revealed that he had consumed the eels the day before.

Dr. Sun Haijian, a deputy director at the Jiangsu Provincial Traditional Chinese operated on the unidentified man. During surgery, they found the "very thick" eels lodged outside of his intestines in the lower part of his abdomen. "Because the eels were alive while being swallowed... A person's intestines are fragile, therefore they will be ruptured as soon as [the eels] bite them," Sun said. They also found a two-centimeter-wide hole on his sigmoid colon.